People are not assholes for putting their elderly relatives into nursing care.

[Hello_Kitty]

In another thread where I have been labeled DU Public Enemy Number One that's about families and children, one of the subjects that has come up relates to the care of elderly parents and who should be doing it. An opinion commonly expressed on DU is that people should care for elderly family members in their own homes and that Americans are horrible for the way we relegate our old people to, as one DUer put it, "the nursing home gulag". Invariably there will be a comparison to those Hard Working Immigrants^TM who never let Grandma languish in some cold heartless nursing home. Because, you know, we evil Amurkins just don't love our Grandmas the way they do.

Leaving aside the lovely ethnic stereotyping going on there, these types of comments reveal a stunning level of ignorance about nursing care. First off, it's not like you can just pack Grandma off to the home at the first sign of forgetfulness. There are specific criteria for qualifying for long term care, whether you are privately insured or get care from the state. You typically have to be unable to perform at least 2 of what are called Activities of Daily Living - bathing, dressing, eating, transferring, using the toilet, and continence. A person with some loss of those abilities may be able to be assisted by relatives for a time but in many cases elderly people require the kind of care that not even the most loving and best intentioned family member can give them unless that person has been trained as a health aid or geriatric nurse. How many people can intubate, catheterize, or put an IV in an 85 year old? If you can, great, but I can't and neither can most other people. How many people are equipped to deal with advanced stage dementia or Alzheimer's? Not many. Not even many of those hard-working-and-love-their-families-more-than-you immigrants.

My own mom died in a nursing home at the relatively young age of 66. She developed severe health problems that impacted her brain and bodily functioning to the extent that it became necessary that she receive 24 hour care. It was not care that I or my sister could have provided even if we both quit our jobs and devoted ourselves to it. Yes, I visited her as often as I could.

In a society where life spans are ever increasing it is outrageously cruel to guilt trip people into thinking they should spend decades of their own lives caring for aged relatives or tell them they are bad people for making the decision to get their relatives the best care available for them while going on with their own lives. I may be an asshole to a lot of people on DU for some of the opinions I express but I'm not an asshole for putting my mom in a nursing home.